Does nelson test out his updates? I have been playing unturned for over 4 years and I realized that many many times when updates come out there is a big bug or many patch notes. I now host a server network and now it is more clear to me that there are many issues when updates come out. It gets really annoying having to restart my servers and lose players because they cant join after a patch.
Yes, he tests his updates, that’s why they’re on the preview branch: so others can test it in addition. In terms of big bugs, there are always bugs and they’ll slip by for various reasons. Some bugs are particularly sneaky and only come up in specific circumstance that makes it difficult for a solo dev, or even for a larger studio to catch. A lot of these issues appear to be server side bugs, which are hard to find unless you are running a server with a lot of people on it. Server owners aren’t interested in running servers on the preview branch, and people aren’t into playing on them either.
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I do my best to keep updates as stable as possible. Thanks kvc.6 for your kind words and covering most points.
Over the years I have worked on gradually improving the automated test coverage, and before setting any version “live” I always manually test singleplayer + multiplayer on a dedicated server, so there are less crazy bugs than there used to be.
There are quite a few helpful and much appreciated players who like testing the latest stuff, so often bugs are caught on the preview branch before the update. Crediting these is a pickle because it’d be confusing to mention bugs-that-weren’t-released in the update notes.
If there are some bugs reported shortly after an update it depends how severe they are. Critical bugs get a patch ASAP, but minor bugs can sometimes wait until the next proper update, or otherwise I wait a few hours to keep the number of patches as low as possible.
Today’s 3.23.6.1 patch was very minor: the blue channel for laser color and nightvision color wasn’t parsed by the game. Without testing a laser/nvg mod I doubt anyone would have caught that on the preview branch.
3.23.4.0 and 3.23.5.0 didn’t require patches.
3.23.3.1 was another very minor patch to increase level batching UV padding because on some systems the Arid objects had a few flickering textures. This was system-dependant so unlikely to be caught on the preview branch.
Admittedly this isn’t looking back particularly far, but yeah for what it’s worth I do try my best.
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Just to add on a bit to the above two messages since they mention the preview branch:
The latest preview branch changelog can always be found on our help center, and it often gets cross-posted to the Forum and/or other locations.
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